Peer Storytelling

I worked with Yurika for my Live Web group project. We were using Peer JS and data channels. We decided we’d take the “storytelling” part of the assignment literally and create a group story in class.

To do so we used both socket.io and peer.js. We used the socket functionality to keep track of peer IDs and usernames on the server. We used peer.js for the storytelling functionality.

The way it works is one person gets to start a game of telephone. That one person is always the person with the username Yurika. They call someone from the userlist. On receiving a call, the prompt to add text to a story appears. After submitting their addition to the story, the user loses the ability to add to the story, and gains the ability to call one person on the user list. Once they make a call, they lose the ability to make calls, and the person receiving the call then has the ability to add to the story. It goes on like this.

This was a fun project because it really helped us see the difference in the functionality beetween socket.io and peer.js. If we were to continue to develop it, we would need to put more restrictions on usernames and make the show/hide functionality on the story and call inputs more robust.

From there, it would be fun to allow people to build stories with images and video clips, instead of just text.